ViCoS Visualising Conceptual Spaces Claus Zinn Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, The Netherlands Claus.Zinn@mpi.nl Lexus/ViCoS workshop, April 2nd. 2009, Nijmegen

Language Documentation Aims: to create representative, long-lasting, multipurpose record of languages to maintain, consolidate or revitalize endangered languages contributes to description of cultural elements of a language community How can we increase cultural aspect? How can we engage community members?

Language Documentation Paper dictionaries’ limited usefulness in language maintenance & language revival (Manning et al., 2000) Speech community may prefer explicit semantic links, possibly of a wide variety of types introducing Conceptual Spaces, where concepts are related to others anchored in language illustrated with multimedia Visualizing Conceptual Spaces Let us briefly focus on data enrichment, situated at the 3rd level of the LAT framework, and the ViCoS tool. An important motivation behind ViCoS is that dictionaries, as they may be constructed with LEXUS, are only of limited use when it comes to maintaining or even reviving a language. ViCoS extends LEXUS in allowing users to make explicit the semantic relations between lexical entries and the concepts they denote. We believe that such functionality will be of interest for linguists but, in particular, for speech community members. They may be less interested the linguistic aspects of a language and more interested in conceptual spaces, where concepts can be related to each other, naturally anchored in the language to express them, and where they can be illustrated with multimedia objects.

Existing lexical resource is starting point ViCoS Existing lexical resource is starting point Words offer key access ViCoS is technology to link words  and the associations they evoke  to other words Ease-of-use to empower community members to actively describe their language & culture and to learn from such resources resources targeted for human consumption Resulting Conceptual Spaces = sort of informal ontology of fuzzily-defined concepts and relationships but where concept nodes are anchored in corresponding formal resources (lexica)